Peter Gay > Quotes

“The true hypocrite knows what he is doing, and does it to his own advantage. The unconscious hypocrite is simply man in civilization.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“Sheer stupidity — that much underrated force in history.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“The ego is continuously, zealously, in search of the world. Compelled to navigate among beacons emitting conflicting and fragmentary signals and exposed to internal pressures of its own, it seeks to extract as much information from its sensations and perceptions as it can. It works to ward off dangers and to repeat pleasures. It organizes, with impressive efficiency, the individual's capacities for response and his encounters with men and things. It reasons, calculates, remembers, compares, thus equipping men to grope their way toward the future. Its appraisals are never beyond suspicion; they are bound to be distorted by conflicts and compromised by traumas. Thus the outside world never really enters the mind unscathed; the impressions with which the individual must work are so many mental representations of the real thing. But the ego, obeying its appetite for experience, bravely continues to determine what is and more difficult, what can be.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“Freud never questioned the powerful participation of objective realities in the very constitution of human experience. Love, as he put it late in life, seeks objects. So does hatred. And those objects are external, not internal, agents of experience.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“The truth is that the angels of anxiety — those overpowering forces for change in politics, economics, science, morals, and social policy — were at the same time agents for self-confidence.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“the Vernunftrepublikaner the Republic was, in a sense, the punishment that the Germans, aristocrats and bourgeois, deserved; it was infinitely preferable to the barbarism of the right and the irresponsibility of the left;”
― Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider

“Hysteria defied self-control; obsessional neurosis mimicked it.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“The austere empiricism and scholarly imagination of the Warburg style were the very antithesis of the brutal anti-intellectualism and vulgar mysticism threatening to barbarize German culture in the 1920s; this was Weimar at its best.”
― Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider

“While the Enlightenment was a family of philosophers, it was something more as well: it was a cultural climate, a world in which the philosophers acted, from which they noisily rebelled and quietly drew many of their ideas, and on which they attempted to impose their program.”
― Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, Volume 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism

“Democratic politics was many things, among them a kind of seduction, documenting once again the interplay of aggression with libido. It awakened and often gratified the electorate’s hostile impulses, or at the very least, its desire for aggressive self-assertion. At the same time, it yoked followers to their leaders to produce a community rife with erotic overtones. Love for one’s favorite politician was intensified by hatred for the opposition.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“Obviously, the history of the franchise is a history of anomalies.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“The German word for “attack,” Angriff, exhibits its roots in the tactile act of grasping, of getting a grip on something, whether an enemy to be annihilated, a railroad network to be constructed, a symphony to be composed.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“His portrait of a married couple — brazen male incompetence on one side, camera-shy female wisdom on the other — must have evoked in many men clusters of mental images, or vague memories, recalling the first and shaping love affair of their lives, with their mother. What Barrie thought every woman knew was something that most men knew, in their troubled unconscious.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“As researchers and experimenters, scholars and theorists, German academics — good bourgeois virtually all of them — made signal contributions to human mastery. But as citizens they failed to claim mastery over their own fate. The way they chose to confine their lives to their professional advancement was a kind of division of labor — scholarship to the scholar, politics to the politician. But it was also a fateful division of power.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“The body of the ponderous scholarly exegesis that began to bather around Busch in his lifetime and picked up speed after his death is witness to the humorlessness of much writing about humor.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“Certainly the psychological work done by wit and humor is heavily overdetermined. It may control, or salute, the sudden release of tension. It may express anxiety or alleviate it; bravado joking is a whistling past the graveyard of physical fear or social uneasiness. Humor may serve as a salutary act of regression — an agreeable holiday from frowning responsibility, a temporary retreat from earnestness that circumvents the punitive superego humans carry about with themselves.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“While it may be hard to live with generalizations, it is inconceivable to live without them.”
― Peter Gay, Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle Class Culture, 1815-1914

“But we were Germans; the gangsters who had taken control of the country were not Germany—we were.”
― Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin

“If my father could not abide Christianity, he had no objections to individual Christians.”
― Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin

“Four days later, on Christmas Day, it was all over. Abraham was forty-eight.”
― Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time

“The need to live by secure, sharply etched classifications is buried deep in the human mind and one of its earliest demands; simplicity allays anxieties by defeating discriminations. Real situations are rarely clear-cut, real feelings often nests of ambivalence. This is something the adult learns to recognize and to tolerate, if he is fortunate; it is a strenuous insight from which he will regress at the first opportunity. That is why the liberal temper, which taught men to live with uncertainties and ambiguities, the most triumphant achievement of nineteenth-century culture, was so vulnerable to the assaults of cruder views of the world, to bigotry, chauvinism, and other coarse and simplistic classifications. "Every society," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in one of his most brilliant aphorisms, "has the tendency to degrade and, as it were, to starve out, its adversaries—at least in its perception." The criminal, he thought, was one victim of such a regressive process; so was the Jew. And "among artists, the 'philistine and bourgeois' becomes a caricature." And artists, the avant-gardes, Nietzsche might have added, only set the tone for the wider culture. Class consciousness, which emerged fitfully and then more and more fully and aggressively towards the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century, enshrined such a caricature: a mixture and social reality and unconscious needs.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“If one could capture children, students, apprentices, even criminals, in the silken chains of guilt feelings, if one could fabricate submissive love for authority figures, the heavy artillery of harsh punishments could be profitably replaced by the subtler and cleaner weapons of control: psychological warfare. The bourgeois conscience was a fraud waiting to be unmasked. On this reading, the Victorian humanitarian style, anxious to bring pugnacity to heel, was only a cover for economic greed, political self-interest, and imperialistic lust for domination.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“Real situations are rarely clear-cut, real feelings often nests of ambivalence. This is something the adult learns to recognize and to tolerate, if he is fortunate; it is a strenuous insight from which he will regress at the first opportunity. That is why the liberal temper, which taught men to live with uncertainties and ambiguities, the most triumphant achievement of nineteenth-century culture, was so vulnerable to the assaults of cruder views of the world, to bigotry, chauvinism, and other coarse and simplistic classifications.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“Anger, too, was a defense against Freud’s message.”
― Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time

“The neurotic may labor to escape his hostile and destructive feelings against loved persons by converting his impermissible hatreds into exaggerated affection.”
― Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time

“Still, hypocrisy — the practice of professing an ideal while consciously violating it — is rarely an adequate explanation for social ideologies. The blatant contradiction between flowery word painting about domestic goddess and the obstructions women faced every day is, rather, a clue to besetting problems below the threshold of awareness. The notion of female power radiating out from the hearth to the world, of recessive, modest mothers and wives determining the careers of men, was an obscure recognition of a fact in male lives. It exhibited, in distorted, almost unrecognizable form, men’s buried dependence on women, beginning with their mothers.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“Hitler had ordered a bloodbath among old followers and imagined rivals, some of them his lieutenants for years. The most spectacular victim of the purge was Ernst Röhm, head of the brown-shirted S.A., who, with other longtime political allies, was shot to death that day or the next.”
― Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin

“The Enlightenment may be summoned up in two words: criticism and power.”
― Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, Volume 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism

“It is telling that common speech should link humor to such pugnacious acts as biting, slashing, cutting. Using the materials of its culture, humor offers splendid openings for the exercise — and the control — of aggression.”
― Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

“parted from Freud, aware how much Freud disliked emotional displays, he spoke lightly about travel plans. Freud, Sachs records, understood”
― Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time